The outage came just two weeks after a similar one darkened the same general area for three days, leaving residents and business owners raging. An underground vault exploded Thursday night around 4:15 p.m., which is the second time in less than a month a vault has caught fire and caused a widespread outage.

The power’s back on in Long Beach, two days after an electrical vault fire left thousands in the dark.

Southern California Edison spokeswoman Susan Cox said earlier that some customers might not have power back until sometime Friday.

Crews have started making repairs based on the inspections, according to the release.

Thursday’s outage was expected to continue into Friday.

“Crews are working hard to make repairs as safely and as quickly as possible”, she said. Gerot echoed the city’s concerns on Saturday morning. As of Saturday morning, it was using 10 generators to power local businesses and residents, and planned to transition off the generators later in the day, Gerot said. “So we’ll be continuing to work with SCE to try to get those answers, and SCE wants those answers as well to prevent any future occurrences”.

SCE crews, some of them brought in from across SCE’s service area, began systematically checking about 300 underground vaults for potential heating, cable and component abnormalities at about 10 a.m. on Friday, Cox said.

But customers being switched off generators were warned to expect an additional outage that could last up to 45 minutes.

However, the problem also stretched beyond Long Beach neighborhoods and onto surrounding freeways.

“The necessary repairs mean that impacted customers will likely be without power through the evening and into tomorrow”, Cox said.